Overview of NMITA

The Neogene Marine
Biota of Tropical
America
(NMITA) WWW Site contains images and information
on taxa collected as part of two large multi-taxa fossil sampling programs:
(1) the Panama Paleontology Project (PPP)
coordinated
by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama; (2) the Neogene
Paleontology of the northern Dominican Republic (DR)
project coordinated by the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland.
NMITA is designed for use in research and education in systematics and
evolutionary paleontology. Partial information is currently available for
bryozoans, corals (zooxanthellate and azooxanthellate), molluscs (gastropods
and bivalves), ostracodes, and fish. Users may click on taxa to receive
conventional taxonomic information on authorship, synonyms, morphology,
type specimens, and spatial and temporal distribution. Alternatively they
may click on maps and stratigraphic columns to receive faunal lists for
specific horizons. The NMITA database and web servers are located in the
Department of Geoscience at the University of Iowa. The fossil collections
are housed at the U.S. National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)
of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and at the Natural History
Museum in Basel, Switzerland (NMB).
For details about the current status of collections and specimens, see
the homepage for each individual taxonomic group.